by Wayne Hull (@wayne_hull) Arguably, digital marketing’s greatest value resides in its ability to segment and target consumers at a granular level. This ensures greater effectiveness and a subsequent return on investment over traditional media, and big brands are realising this fact.
Already, trends in the US and Europe show that spend in non-traditional channels exceeds 50% — the tipping point has been reached. However, knowing who your customer is and how to reach them online is now only half the battle won. Technology has become pervasive and companies already have access to massive swathes of customer data, but how do they leverage these to deliver effective, impactful marketing in the digital age? The answer is to create a meaningful customer experience through a blend of marketing and technology.
The first step
The first step in this process is the attainment of meaningful customer insights. Effective marketing today depends on knowing what a customer wants, needs, and loves, with the capabilities to track how these evolve to enable brands to respond to changes in real time. This is best achieved by leveraging technology, such as applying powerful analytics tools to big data to draw out vital insights, and by closely tracking online behaviour and interactions to define a customer’s online journey.
Powerful personalised messaging and content may then be created and delivered via multiple channels to reach and touch the right consumer, at the right time, in the right context. This gives marketers the ability to craft a hyper-personalised approach that delivers a better customer experience in both the digital and the physical world — one that is more than just a marketing campaign.
Through these systems and processes, executives also learn more about who they’re selling to, with impactful insights into why customers are buying, or why they aren’t, and how they respond to targeting. They also gain a better understanding of the effectiveness of marketing spend through data on conversion rates, and interaction and engagement metrics.
Only the enabler
However, the technology is only the enabler. Banking on technology to be the panacea to the digital marketing conundrum will, unfortunately, not solve the challenges brands currently face. The technology is yesterday’s discussion. Today’s discussion needs to be about how we make these technologically enabled touch points ‘loveable’.
Ultimately the customer doesn’t care about the tech. What they care about is the experience they have when engaging with a brand, through whichever channel that may be. So, how then do marketers make the experience more personable?
This, for numerous marketers globally, is the biggest challenge they face at present. In many instances, businesses are dealing with legacy environments that need to be transformed, as this will enable the business to craft a uniform experience, through its many touchpoints, to deliver the omnichannel model that best blends alternative with traditional media.
Decoupling core systems
To achieve this, companies need to consider how they decouple their core systems to unbundle certain technologies, and introduce new and relevant variants in a manner that will enhance and expand customer touchpoints to ultimately create a seamless and consistent experience through all channels that are currently active. However, it’s more than just technology and marketing capabilities that need to be addressed. An organisational mind-shift also needs to happen around what contemporary marketing entails, particularly about how marketers work with technology and digital teams to create modern marketing’s new architecture and deliver the requisite customer experience.
This is no easy task. While technologies such as automation may help, there’s a fundamental need to integrate various business environments, such as the typical customer or partner portal and call centre, and new entry points such as apps and social media channels, with the backend environment.
This experience architecture also needs to ensure that traditional marketing elements blend with digital because, if marketers aren’t using all the relevant mediums available to them, then it’s a wasted opportunity. And without the ability to create a hyper-personalised and ‘loveable’ experience, money currently spent on digital marketing will prove to be highly ineffective. However, when marketers in the digital age get customer experience right, the ROI has the potential to be enormous.
Wayne Hull (@wayne_hull) is the recently appointed managing director of Accenture Digital for South and sub-Saharan Africa. He has returned to South Africa after spending 13 years in the Middle East, Pakistan and Switzerland, where he was at the forefront of the cutting-edge technology in the areas of internet of things (IoT), data analytics and online media.
“Motive” is a by-invitation-only column on MarkLives.com. Contributors are picked by the editors but generally don’t form part of our regular columnist lineup, unless the topic is off-column.
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